The FReeper Foxhole Profiles William "Buffalo Bill" Cody - Aug. 2nd, 2004

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[SAMWolf]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
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FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.

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William F. Cody
(1846-1917)

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In a life that was part legend and part fabrication, William F. Cody came to embody the spirit of the West for millions, transmuting his own experience into a national myth of frontier life that still endures today.

Born in Scott County, Iowa, in 1846, Cody grew up on the prairie. When his father died in 1857, his mother moved to Kansas, where Cody worked for a wagon-freight company as a mounted messenger and wrangler. In 1859, he tried his luck as a prospector in the Pikes Peak gold rush, and the next year, joined the Pony Express, which had advertised for "skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily." Already a seasoned plainsman at age 14, Cody fit the bill.


William F. Cody, age 11. Tintype, c. 1857. William F. Cody Collection.

During the Civil War, Cody served first as a Union scout in campaigns against the Kiowa and Comanche, then in 1863 he enlisted with the Seventh Kansas Cavalry, which saw action in Missouri and Tennessee. After the war, he married Louisa Frederici in St. Louis and continued to work for the Army as a scout and dispatch carrier, operating out of Fort Ellsworth, Kansas.

Finally, in 1867, Cody took up the trade that gave him his nickname, hunting buffalo to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad. By his own count, he killed 4,280 head of buffalo in seventeen months. He is supposed to have won the name "Buffalo Bill" in an eight-hour shooting match with a hunter named William Comstock, presumably to determine which of the two Buffalo Bill’s deserved the title.


William F. Cody, 1865, age 19

Beginning in 1868, Cody returned to his work for the Army. He was chief of scouts for the Fifth Cavalry and took part in 16 battles, including the Cheyenne defeat at Summit Springs, Colorado, in 1869. For his service over these years, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1872, although this award was revoked in 1916 on the grounds that Cody was not a regular member of the armed forces at the time. (The award was restored posthumously in 1989).

All the while Cody was earning a reputation for skill and bravery in real life, he was also becoming a national folk hero, thanks to the exploits of his alter ego, "Buffalo Bill," in the dime novels of Ned Buntline (pen name of the writer E. Z. C. Judson). Beginning in 1869, Buntline created a Buffalo Bill who ranked with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and Kit Carson in the popular imagination, and who was, like them, a mixture of incredible fact and romantic fiction.


An extremely early portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody (left) and Louis Richard.

In 1872 Buntline persuaded Cody to assume this role on stage by starring in his play, The Scouts of the Plains, and though Cody was never a polished actor, he proved a natural showman, winning enthusiastic applause for his good-humored self-portrayal. Despite a falling out with Buntline, Cody remained an actor for eleven seasons, and became an author as well, producing the first edition of his autobiography in 1879 and publishing a number of his own Buffalo Bill dime novels. Eventually, there would be some 1,700 of these frontier tales, the majority written by Prentiss Ingraham.

But not even show business success could keep Cody from returning to the West. Between theater seasons, he regularly escorted rich Easterners and European nobility on Western hunting expeditions, and in 1876 he was called back to service as an army scout in the campaign that followed Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn.



On this occasion, Cody added a new chapter to his legend in a "duel" with the Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair, whom he supposedly first shot with a rifle, then stabbed in the heart and finally scalped "in about five seconds," according to his own account. Others described the encounter as hand-to-hand combat, and misreported the chief’s name as Yellow Hand. Still others said that Cody merely lifted the chief’s scalp after he had died in battle. Whatever actually occurred, Cody characteristically had the event embroidered into a melodrama--Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer--for the fall theater season.

Cody’s own theatrical genius revealed itself in 1883, when he organized Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, an outdoor extravaganza that dramatized some of the most picturesque elements of frontier life: a buffalo hunt with real buffalos, an Indian attack on the Deadwood stage with real Indians, a Pony Express ride, and at the climax, a tableau presentation of Custer’s Last Stand in which some Lakota who had actually fought in the battle played a part. Half circus and half history lesson, mixing sentimentality with sensationalism, the show proved an enormous success, touring the country for three decades and playing to enthusiastic crowds across Europe.



In later years Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would star the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, the first "King of the Cowboys," Buck Taylor, and for one season, "the slayer of General Custer," Chief Sitting Bull. Cody even added an international flavor by assembling a "Congress of Rough Riders of the World" that included cossacks, lancers and other Old World cavalrymen along with the vaqueros, cowboys and Indians of the American West.

Though he was by this time almost wholly absorbed in his celebrity existence as Buffalo Bill, Cody still had a real-life reputation in the West, and in 1890 he was called back by the army once more during the Indian uprisings associated with the Ghost Dance. He came with some Indians from his troupe who proved effective peacemakers, and even traveled to Wounded Knee after the massacre to help restore order.


"Buffalo Bill" Cody and the Prince of Monacco presented Plenty Coups a rifle in a 1913 ceremony in Cody, Wyoming.

Cody made a fortune from his show business success and lost it to mismanagement and a weakness for dubious investment schemes. In the end, even the Wild West show itself was lost to creditors. Cody died on January 10, 1917, and is buried in a tomb blasted from solid rock at the summit of Lookout Mountain near Denver, Colorado.

[SAMWolf]

Morning E.G.C.

Enjoy the shopping trip.

[Aeronaut]

Hey Sam.

[stand watie]

GM,Sam!

free dixie,sw

[SAMWolf]

Nearly every day we encounter people whose lives creak and grate harshly with problems.

Snippy's been talking about me again, right. ;-)

The human spirit can gain new hope from an encouraging word.

It's amazing how much an encouraging word can help sometimes.

[SAMWolf]

Morning stand watie.

Things beginning to get back to some semblance of normal for Sandra?

[SAMWolf]

Good Morning Feather

[Soaring Feather]

Doing well today thanks sw. Up early for me. Went to bed at a decent hour, around midnight. LOL

Lovely morning, sun is out, skies are blue, a treat for water soaked Up-State NY.


free dixie, bf

[GailA]

Did you all catch this thread?

The Difference Between Them (KERRY TO GIVE NUCLEAR FUEL TO IRAN)

John Kerry regards an Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism armed with nuclear weapons as unacceptable. He has a multiple-part strategy that is much more realistic than the Bush administration's. One is to rejoin and work through the international legal framework on arms control. That will give greater force to the major powers if they have to deal with violators. Secondly, he has laid out, I think in the most comprehensive way in modern memory, a program to secure nuclear materials around the world—particularly in the former Soviet Union but also in the places where research reactors have existed that could be susceptible to proliferation. The point is to try to prevent Iran from ever getting this material surreptitiously. Thirdly, he has proposed that rather than letting the British, the French and the Germans do this themselves, that we together call the bluff of the Iranian government, which claims that its only need is energy. And we say to them: "Fine, we will provide you the fuel that you need if Russia fails to provide it." Participating in such a diplomatic initiative makes it more likely to succeed.

[Professional Engineer]

Good morning ladies. Flag-o-gram.

Bombs bursting in air at Ft. McHenry.

[stand watie]

more or less.

this week (or perhaps the next 2-3!)we start trying to head back up to Pine Bluff to clean out her uncle's house,have the estate sale,sell/rent/lease the house.

with this !@#$%^&*! BRACE, it should be "FUN"! (riding in/getting IN& OUT of a regular car is still a PROJECT, so you can imagine how exciting doing anything else is!!!!)

wanna buy a NICE 5BR rancher in AR????

THEN, about the time we finish that project, she has 2-3 MONTHS of intensive physical therapy! (TORTURE!)

free dixie,sw

[SAMWolf]

Did we run out of Evil Overlord recommendations? :-(

1943 PT-109 rammed & sunk

I can just image Kerry hoping his Swift Boat would be rammed so he could be even more like the real JFK.

[Soaring Feather]

Good morning PE. WOW great Flag-O-Gram today, thank you.

[SAMWolf]

Sleep? You get to sleep? ;-)

[stand watie]

occasionally NOW. i went several days/DAZE with NONE! (when she was in the hospital)

free dixie,sw

[SAMWolf]

Morning GailA.

"KERRY TO GIVE NUCLEAR FUEL TO IRAN"

Why not? Carter and Clinton pretty much did the same for North Korea and look at how it stopped them from making nuclear weapons. < /sarcasm>

[SAMWolf]

Morning PE. Nice!!

[SAMWolf]

wanna buy a NICE 5BR rancher in AR????

If it wasn't in Arkansas I might consider it, I haven't forgiven them for Clinton yet. :-)

2-3 MONTHS of intensive physical therapy!

That does not sound like fun at all. That's when she's gonna really need your support.

[SAMWolf]

We need more hours in the day.

[stand watie]

AR hasn't forgiven AR for wee willie klintoon either.

and NOPE, i'm NOT looking forward to her PT with glee.

having had some of that, i call PT, physical TORTURE!

free dixie,sw

[Valin]

Did we run out of Evil Overlord recommendations?

No I just decided to make a change. Who know if you're a very good boy and eat your Brussel Sprouts it may be back.
Bribery works too.
I can't be bought..but I can be rented.